Enlightened Librarian: The Information

Enter the Iliad -- a wireless e-paper reader on the horizon · Dec 20, 06:42 PM

Since writing about the promise of electronic paper last spring, I’ve been waiting for a first-generation wireless e-paper reader to hit the market. Seems that will happen in April, although the “Iliad”—an e-reader with an eight-inch grayscale display and the capacity to download from the Internet—is being targeted for business-to-business applications, not yet to consumers.

The Dutch-based company iRex, a spinoff of electronics manufacturer Philips, announced the product today. It says the palm-sized device will include 224-MB of Flash memory, enough for over a month of newspapers and 30 books. In a one-page product description iRex describes the display as supporting 1024×768 pixels at 16 levels of gray and 160 dots per inch.

Underlying the device is the charged-particle technology of E-Ink, a Massachusets-based company that created a paper-like reading surface whose images and text can be rewritten, held in a static state with minimal power consumption and read in low light.

If the quality of the reading experience is sufficiently good, the market for a wireless e-paper reader could be significant. It would fill a gap between expensive and increasingly unportable laptops and versatile but ungainly PDAs, whose LCD screens have improved markedly in recent years, but which still do not lend themselves to extended periods of reading electronic text. Philips previously licensed its e-paper screen to Sony, which released its Librié reader in Japan; the device was praised for the clarity of its screen, but sharply criticized for its proprietary file format. iRex says the Iliad will accept a wide range of text formats, will include the ability to make annotations and will also play MP3s.

A number of manufacturers have announced that they are racing toward a marketable e-paper product in the next year or so. Some have questioned the longevity of a charged-particle display over a more conventional LCD that could also serve as a paper substitute, but iRex claims it has stabilized E-Ink’s technology.

In an interesting bit of related news, E-Ink’s primary competitor in charged-particle displays, the Xerox subsidiary Gyricon, announced last week that it will close at the end of December. Instead of focusing on e-readers, Gyricon had concentrated on the commercial signage market. The move will result in 50 layoffs.

See photos of the Iliad at iRex’s site

Read the closure announcement on Gyricon’s website

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Chasing e-paper · Mar 31, 11:05 PM

This essay appears in the April 2005 issue of Quill & Quire magazine:

Remember e-books? If you thought they were an aberration of the late 1990s, like new Volkswagen Beetles or Ricky Martin, you’re wrong. They’re coming back – and this time, driven by a new format of reader-friendly electronic paper, they’ll be here to stay.

If the Dutch electronics giant Philips and other manufacturers have their way, we will soon enter a new era of electronic scrolls. These will be cheap, plastic screens that will look and feel much like paper; they will unroll from a pen-sized holder or cellphone and download the day’s newspaper (or a new novel) through a wireless Internet connection.

Such an era is still five years away or more, and there are still some major technical hurdles for e-paper to overcome. But with newspapers and magazines desperate for young readers, and signs that e-paper textbooks would be a hit among college students, a critical mass for e-books could be just around the corner. If marketed properly, e-paper could even lead to a revitalization of mass-market and backlist publishing.
The concept of e-paper – a bendable screen with rewriteable electronic ink – has been around for years, but a flurry of recent developments suggests that the phenomenon could go mainstream by the end of the decade. Last April, Sony’s Japanese division launched a first-generation version of e-paper technology, the Librié e-book reader. Although its rigid plastic body can’t be rolled into a pocket, the device quickly earned kudos from reviewers for the newsprint-like clarity of its six-inch display.

The Librié’s display, which is licensed to Sony by Philips in partnership with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based E-Ink, replaces the LCD screen typical of Palm Pilots and cellphones with a plastic membrane containing thousands of tiny black-and-white particles. An electric current creates a static charge that aligns the particles to create text or monochrome images on a whitish background. The Librié boasts a resolution of 170 dots per inch, over twice that of a standard computer monitor, and features one of e-paper’s main advantages over other electronic displays – the screen image remains in place when the power is turned off. Sony claims that the Librié’s three triple-A batteries should last through 10,000 page views.

Sony’s device is seen as the first major market test for e-paper, which is expected to appear in flexible versions in the coming years. Philips has spun off a dedicated research unit to pursue further applications, and early last year the division announced it had created a five-inch screen of 85 dots per inch that could be rolled into a tube two centimetres wide. (The company’s website features photographs of several fanciful-looking concepts, including a wrist-sized GPS locator with an unrollable map, a pen-sized reading strip, and a cellphone scroll.)

Philips is not the only electronics megacorp working on e-paper technology. Fujitsu and Epson have both announced efforts to release flexible e-paper, next year and in five years respectively. E-paper is also a hot topic in academia, with numerous projects in North America, Asia, and Europe reporting progress in creating flexible displays in colour and speeding refresh rates to accommodate video transmission.

For now, though, e-paper is not without technical problems. It’s sluggish to use – Philips’ Librié screen takes half a second to update – and it has durability issues as well. In existing flexible prototypes, for example, the more the plastic sheet is bent, the faster its circuitry will degrade. Epson estimates that its own flexible e-paper would only last a few months before wearing out; the company’s betting that Japanese consumers’ appetite for newspapers and magazines will keep them buying replacements. (Just how pricey e-paper would be remains to be seen. In a December story in PC World magazine Epson estimates that a letter-sized e-sheet would cost “well under $100 [U.S.]”) The long-term effectiveness of the e-ink itself is also untested, and the drive to improve resolution and to introduce colour means increasing the complexity of the microcapsules that control the image.

Certainly, e-paper’s development has been relatively slow. The concept of charged-particle electronic ink was invented in the 1970s by Xerox, whose spinoff company, Gyricon, has since concentrated on developing a line of e-paper-based commercial signage. Electronic ink for reading devices has been spearheaded by Gyricon’s main rival, e-Ink, which was spun off from MIT in 1997. With no shortage of chutzpah, the company’s founder, Joseph Jacobson, made waves at that time with his ambitious plan for a “last book,” a bound collection of several hundred e-pages that could be used to download an entire library’s worth of titles.
Such a book is still a long way off, but the current pace of research suggests that the basic challenges of e-paper will be resolved in the next few years. Should charged-particle ink prove too complex to refine further, for example, flexible e-paper may emerge from another technology, such as Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLED), which, like e-ink, also retain an image when the power is off.

Once the technological glitches are worked out, a number of factors suggest that e-paper readers could succeed where first-generation reading appliances, such as Gemstar and Rocket eBook readers, did not.

First, e-paper promises a far superior and more intuitive reading experience than current LCD screens and computer monitors. That fact in itself should win converts from those who currently view reading electronic text as an eye-straining chore. Sony’s Librié, for example, can be read in low-light conditions at a variety of angles, and it does not require a backlight. The reading experience should also improve as the resolution of e-paper increases. A guru of computer usability, Jakob Nielsen, pointed out in 1998 that existing computer screens cause people to read about 25% slower than printed paper, but that gap disappears when the resolution improves to print-like quality. There’s no reason why E-Ink’s stated goal of “radio paper” – a rewriteable medium with the look and much of the feel of real paper – should not find a ready audience with casual and dedicated readers alike.

Second, e-books have already been selling well for PDAs and similar devices. Granted, the quantities are small compared to overall print sales – less than 0.1 per cent of the $20-billion-plus U.S. publishing industry. But the Open eBook Forum reports that e-books have seen steady double-digit growth quarter by quarter since 2002. So far, e-books are largely an add-on item for multitasking handheld devices, raising the question of whether a dedicated e-paper reader would attract PDA afficionados or be seen to lack versatility. But encouraging signs of e-book growth suggest that the e-book market is ripe for expansion and could “tip,” given the right combination of affordable, high-quality hardware and plentiful, easy-to-access content, a combination that has been lacking in the e-book readers released so far. The stickiness of the iPod is a valuable lesson here: promote the readers not as a tech gadget but a lifestyle accessory, give users a way to network, share booklists, and build insider knowledge, and there’s no reason why a measure of the iPod’s success can’t be translated to an e-book device, especially one aimed at digital-savvy youth. The higher-ed textbook market would be a natural starting point to introduce such readers. Experiments in electronic textbook delivery are becoming more common – witness Pearson’s SafariX e-textbook venture launched last year – and e-paper readers would offer a lower-cost alternative to laptops and tablet PCs for accessing textbook content and other online course materials. Were educational publishers to adopt a licensing model for their electronic editions that would bill institutions by student usage of particular texts – similar to how databases and software are licensed now – publishers’ fears of revenue loss from piracy would be allayed while e-texts would gain a widespread, institutional footing.

Third, the newspaper and magazine industries are increasingly desperate to attract a new generation of subscribers, giving them a strong interest in supporting wireless e-book readers for their electronic editions. (Here, an open e-book standard would be key to take advantage of an e-text market rising on several fronts.) One analyst with the International Newspaper Marketing Association recently called for a downsizing of broadsheets to a newsmagazine format that would be easier to adapt to a variety of electronic displays. Newspapers and magazines also have an incentive to push for electronic delivery both to cut production costs and to boost revenue by creating segmented advertising targeted to specific reader groups. This market will also become more viable as wireless connectivity becomes even more pervasive, which is expected to be a further by-product of the plastic chip revolution driving e-paper itself.

The prospect of widely available e-paper readers for newspapers and textbooks are the best hope publishers have of gaining niche e-book sales for general-interest and backlist titles. Random House veteran Jason Epstein has proposed a national infrastructure of print-on-demand machines to do just that, but mustering the resources to create such a network remains the major barrier to his proposal.

In theory, there should be nothing to stop publishers, either individually or collectively, from serving e-books through the web. That’s the easy part. The hard part will be to create a digital rights scheme that protects creators while fostering demand. That, of course, is the million-dollar question. In Sony’s case, praise for the Librié’s hardware has not blunted reviewers’ disdain for its limited, proprietary content and restrictive 60-day access terms. Perhaps Sony should have taken another lesson from the iPod; users, it seems, will buy into a digital delivery model that is convenient, offers plenty of choice, and is perceived to be fair.

Naturally, publishers will need to weigh security concerns and issues of digital rights management, but they should also factor in users’ perceptions of quid pro quo. Choice will be the most important factor. Five years from now, full-text searching of many thousands of books from one’s desktop will be commonplace (courtesy of Google and Amazon), and users will expect to be able to acquire and to read those books instantly. Publishers would do well to consider the possibilities of broad collaboration with other print media to create a new-style content distributor. They might, for example, offer a database of titles so large that users are willing to pay by subscription for time-limited access (a rent-your-library option), or allow users to purchase long-term access to titles and to be able lend them to their friends (a build-your-library option). The iPod works in part because its infrastructure is impressive and robust. After some disappointing starts with e-book readers and other e-book ventures, such as netLibrary, publishers will have perhaps one more chance with e-paper to build a distribution platform that is sticky enough to draw consumers in.

The potential for e-paper to provide a rewriteable newsprint – and to be potentially as ubiquitous as newsprint is now – could represent an enormous opportunity. It will be up to publishers to work the numbers, but, as with Epstein’s famous introduction of the first quality paperbacks half a century ago, e-paper may also require a leap of faith.

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Down in the digital library skunkworks · Jan 24, 10:09 PM

It’s a bit like having a glimpse into the greasy workshop of Messrs. Wright—take a bird (a library) and make a plane (a digital library). Is it better to model the shape and the wingbeat, or merely to borrow the concept and build something totally new?

Digital libraries have been around for a decade or more, but they’re still very much in the silk-scarf and barnstorming phase: plenty of wild experimentation, the odd crackup, lots of spirited debate. When I can, I try to follow the developments at both ends of the philosophical spectrum. On one hand are the cool abstractionists, those who are intent on synthesizing entirely new ways of browsing document collections, often with odd, but frequently compelling, visualization tools. A now-classic example is the 10-year-old hyperbolic tree interface developed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Using the idea of a fisheye lense to increase one’s field of view, the developers made it possible to see the titles of hundreds, even thousands, of documents simultaneously and to glimpse the relationships between them. (The paper explaining the project is accessible here.) In another variation on the abstractionist theme, my friend David (or try here) completed his PhD thesis exploring whether it might be more effective than a regular file directory to have a person explore a virtual, three-dimensional world to find information. David transformed subject exploration into virtual island-hopping to take advantage of the kind of wayfinding skills one uses in the real world. (His results are inconclusive, but the thesis is very cool.)

On the other hand are the neo-literalists, transposing recognizable aspects of libraries into the digital realm, and leveraging, they would say, users’ cognitive mapping of real libraries into virtual space. (Translation: if you’ve been to a library before, you’ll know basically how they work, and if a virtual library looks similar, you’ll presumably be able to make your way around and do things without being taught.) There are two papers I know of in this regard that are truly wonderful—very much in the spirit of Orville and Wilbur in the bicycle shop tinkering in the wee, wee hours.

My favourite remains an experiment by Michael Christoffel and Bethina Schmitt, two researchers at Karlsruhe University, who in 2002 published their result of recreating a walkthrough model of the university’s main library using the three-dimensional rendering abilities of the videogame Quake II. Now, this game is known as a “first-person shooter” and normally involves watching a screen whose main identifiables are an enormous gun (wielded by you) and generous quantities of exploding flesh (your worthy opponents). Christoffel and Schmitt make a rather hilarious attempt to calm the game down for academic use by transforming the personal artillery into a laser pointer, which one may point, bazooka-like, at a virtual shelf to retrieve a virtual book. The pair conclude, however, with a mild warning that the normal mode of Quake II may have unfortunate resonance with some students if their prototype is adopted for library use: “Although our library interface is harmless, it is possible to use the same game engine with maps found in the Internet which may have an unexpected influence on some few [sic] people.” (Read their paper here.)

More recently, another group of researchers from New Zealand’s University of Waikato have gone to some lengths to create a model of a physical book to add tactility to the experience of online reading. The project of Yi-Chun Chu, David Bainbridge, Matt Jones and Ian H. Witten involved first replicating individual page turns in great animatronic detail, followed by—in year two—the construction of a model book with fusty qualities: signature marks, a flexing spine and pages that become grubbier with use. As a modelling exercise, the experiment is high on the quirkiness scale. Bravely, the four quote the less-than-glowing verdict of one of their academic referees in the paper’s subtitle: Realistic books: A bizarre homage to an obsolete medium?

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Dreaming in Kodachrome · Jan 7, 12:47 PM

Given the rapid rate of digital camera adoption,¹ photographic film will this year edge closer to the abyss that swallowed rotary telephones and Edison Wax Cylinders. I already feel a sort of anticipatory nostalgia for the happy colours of film packaging, those little plastic canisters that serve no useful purpose and the folded sheets of exposure advice that no one ever read.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not so much of a crank that I think digital photography is a bad idea. Eventually I’ll succumb to the enticements of instantaneous results and developing without tears. It’s just that, for me, the pleasure of photography comes only partly in the exposing of decent frames; the other part is the stuff—flash cords, screw-on filters, a good supply of film in the fridge—that are part of the largesse of one’s hobby. Film photography is about materiel, and the satisfyingly physical act of admitting light through a shutter to expose an emulsion that is immersed in a chemical bath. Film is also about using a physical medium to cheat time and decay, a gentlemanly contest of chemistry and good care versus the time-wearing effects of light and heat.

Such a contest is rendered moot by digitization—in theory at least. Yet compact disc manufacturers typically peg the lifespan of a CD—the most typical storage medium for digital photos—at about 100 years. That, give or take, is about the same longevity ascribed to one of the best photographic films ever produced: Kodachrome slides.

When Charles W. Cushman started taking slide photographs in the late 1930s, he settled for nothing less. As a result, the Charles W. Cushman Photography Collection captures an astonishing record of one American’s life over 30 years. Here are street scenes from 60 years ago preserved in such vivid colours that the intervening period falls away: the past is now.

An Indianan whose varied career included work as an editor, statistician, businessman and civil servant, Cushman was an obsessive documentarian, and the collection—some 14,500 slides taken between 1938 and 1969—is wonderfully catalogued. It’s easy to spend hours browsing by a myriad of subjects—clothing, locations, activities—or choosing a year and following Cushman’s photographic decisions frame by frame, and roll by roll.

There are many beautiful pictures—try this or this—not the least because they look as though they were taken yesterday. There are also many that are kind of pedestrian, poorly exposed or both. But his less-than-stellar work just makes the collection all the more charming—and valuable as a complete archive. Cushman knew he had talent, but also wasn’t afraid to show his warts when he donated all of his photos and his camera equipment to the University of Indiana at Bloomington upon his death in 1972. (The university’s library digitized the collection and launched a web site in 2003.)

Cushman’s photos say: don’t discount the old stuff. There were miracles of permanency preserved on film, just as (with luck) today’s digital photos should promote fascination and curiosity a century—or more—from now.

¹The research firm IDC predicts that there will be more prints made from digital images than from film in 2006, and digital prints will account for over 70 percent of all prints by 2008.

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When the government had its hands in the art of the nation · Dec 23, 02:15 PM

If you’ve seen Cradle Will Rock you will have encountered the Work Projects Administration, a key component of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Like the Federal Theatre Program depicted in the movie, the Federal Art Program put creative types to work on projects to encourage civic renewal. In 2000, the Library of Congress’s American Memory project launched a digital collection of 908 colour posters from that program. The collection is featured in this month’s D-Lib Magazine.

Many of the posters are stunningly beautiful, and well worth taking some time to browse. The collection represents a lost era of civic engagement, and a unique period in American graphic design.

Starting today, I’ll be gradually compiling an annotated list of some of my favourite digital library collections, many of them showcased in D-Lib Magazine. At the same time, I’ll make an index so they can be located easily. There are many fantastic resources out there, but they’re maddeningly difficult to find amongst all the chaff.

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